Hydrogen challenges EVs

Investing in bipolar when MOS was the coming technology, investing in NMOS when CMOS was gaining traction and investing in Mercury Communications – which started setting up phone boxes in the UK in 1986 and stopped in 1995 when it realised that mobile phones were making phone boxes an anachronism – all turned out to be bad choices.

It’s now beginning to look like that for the electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure industry. The mainstream opinion is that batteries will power EVs and there seems to be a rare political consensus that it is worth investing tax-payers’ money into electric cars. Both main parties had such plans in their manifestos, though not such an extent as to address the EV vs fuel cell vehicle (FCV) issue.

Hydrogen fuel cells are appearing as an alternative power source to battery power for vehicles. The world is bursting with energy but it is not in the places where most people want to use it. Converting solar energy in the Sahara into hydrogen and then transporting the hydrogen to where it is needed is more efficient than using a cable to shift electricity from place to place.

There are not many hydrogen fuel cell recharging stations in the UK – they cost £1.5m each to build – but there are a few, including a cluster around the Home Counties, two in Wales and two in Scotland.

China has a $50bn hydrogen fuel cell R&D project and the EU is spending €12.5bn on hydrogen fuel cell R&D. Meanwhile Toyota, Hyundai and Honda are manufacturing and selling hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles. The USA has 34 public hydrogen fuelling stations, of which 31 are in California, which has 3,245 fuel cell‑powered vehicles – 53% of all the fuel cell vehicles registered worldwide. Japan has 38% of them while Europe has 9%.

So it’s early days for fuel cell vehicles but there’s enough going on, maybe, to raise a niggle of doubt in an EV infrastructure planner.